remark that it is as natural an occurrence as birth.
In fact, as is obvious to the most superficial mind, birth and death
are inextricably interwoven. The great life of the worlds is so one,
so powerful, so omnipresent, that nothing can so utterly pass away as
to give birth to nothing--no, not even the cremated remains which are
blown to the four winds. The theory that death is a non-natural
occurrence arbitrarily inflicted by the Deity in his anger at Adam's
disobedience is no longer taught even in the nursery, because aeons
upon aeons before man's advent hither death reigned supreme over
sentient existence, and the bones of the doomed are in our museums to
attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the
mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far
back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken and frozen in its
ice grave 200,000 years ago. The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he
stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible
devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death
than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the
earth. The law of growth is the law of death. Life begins, it
increases, it reaches its meridian, it begins to waver and then
steadily to decline, till at length the bodily frame dissolves, and
then--

That which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

It is so with all things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from
a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us.
It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence
and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is
unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the
words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them:
"this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the
Divine will endureth for ever"! As we said, the one changeless thing,
beyond the doom of sun-stars and swarms of worlds, is the will of man
nobly submissive to the Great Obedience of the Supreme Law--the Law of
Justice and of Truth. That alone can never die.

Let us turn now to the ethical and religious aspect of that which we
have seen to be in itself so natural, so inevitable.

In the first place, we conceive that it in no wise interrupts the
progress of the individual life. Certainly the conditions under which
existence maintains